Downton Abbey basks in Emmy glow

BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. — “I don’t want to cast a pall over all this happiness,” Shirley MacLaine says in the new season of Downton Abbey, as wealthy American matriarch Martha Levinson.

“However would you do that?” Maggie Smith replies, with an unmistakable hint of huffiness and sarcasm as Violet Crawley, the Dowager Countess of Grantham.

A long clip from the upcoming season — it won’t air on PBS until January — played to a ballroom of out-of-town journalists late Saturday at the summer meeting of the TV Critics Association.

As intriguing as the highlight reel was, though — and Masterpiece executive producer Rebecca Eaton insisted that the visiting reporters would have to sign in blood on seeing the scenes — it paled in comparison to what was to come next: a three-hour get-together with newly minted Emmy nominees Hugh Bonneville, Brendan Coyle, Michelle Dockery, Joanne Froggatt, Downton Abbey writer-creator Julian Fellowes, producer Gareth Neame and Hollywood royalty herself, Shirley MacLaine Beatty, resplendent in white and looking fit-as-a-fiddle as age 78.

Hollywood get-togethers are a dime a dozen, but there was something uniquely, palpably different about this one. Dockery practically glowed with internal energy, and the looks on Coyle, Bonneville and Froggatt’s faces were of pure joy.

Downton Abbey came to Hollywood this night, just days after the talk-of-the-town costume drama garnered 16 Emmy nominations, and the young U.K. actors were determined to soak up every moment.

Downton Abbey’s Emmy haul — 16 nominations this year and 12 last year for a total of 28, historically the most any non-American series, including Upstairs Downstairs, has received since the beginning of the Emmys — came as a surprise to the actors, despite Downton Abbey’s clear cultural cachet.

“We have a word in England — gobsmacked,” Bonneville said. “I don’t know if it translates. Overwhelmed is an understatement. In my category, to hear my name in the same breath, so to speak, as Jon Hamm and Damian Lewis and the others is a tremendous honour. It really is. And to have the show embraced so wholeheartedly by America is very special to us.”

They were filming a scene in the U.K. for the new season when word first broke of the nominations. Froggatt, who plays Anna, the new Mrs. Bates, was on her lunch break; she’d gone to the post office to run errands. She was late getting back; she had to rush to her dressing room to change back into her costume. Her phone was buzzing the whole way with a stream of text messages from Dockery: “Congratulations.” Her manager was trying to get through, too. Froggatt had no idea what was going on. She was struggling with her costume, dropped her phone, picked it up, and phoned Dockery directly.

“I was, like, ‘What’s going on?'” Froggatt recalled. “She was, like, ‘You’re nominated; we’re all nominated. We got 16.’ I was just screaming and jumping and down. Brendan (Coyle) and I didn’t see each other until we went back to finish the scene. So in the first half of the scene he’s normal and calm.”

“Pre-nominated,” Coyle said, without missing a beat.

“Pre-nominated,” Froggatt repeated.

“Second half, post-nominated,” Coyle said. “I want to see the rushes, see if there’s any kind of glow.”

“Well, I have very red ears in the post-nominated scene,” Froggatt said. “Because I was so flushed and emotional that, yeah, it’ll be interesting to see if people spot that scene.”

Actually, Neame said dryly, “The director told me they became impossible to work with.”

“Instant divas,” Dockery said.

People often ask why Downton Abbey became so popular so quickly, especially in North America, and the real answer, according to Fellowes, “is (we) haven’t a clue.”

MacLaine, for her part, thinks she has some idea why.

“I travel a lot, and I saw it’s a hit in Thailand, in Cambodia, in southern areas of the world. I thought, well, these people are on the Internet and they’re used to an overabundance of information. What (Julian Fellowes) has done so brilliantly is take 15 characters and combinations, with just the right amount of time on the screen, which first with the Internet tolerance for emotional knowledge.”

“The program for attention deficit disorder,” Fellowes said dryly.

Was MacLaine a fan of the show earlier?

“Actually, no.”

Downton Abbey came to her as a happy accident one day.

“I walked into my hairdresser salon in Malibu and they were talking about it. What are they talking about, I thought; I’d better take a look. I did. Well, I have to tell you, I saw it. I ran three months of it and became just as addicted as everybody else, which made me wonder about my own attention deficit syndrome.

“Then, when it was announced I was going to play Martha Levinson, I didn’t know anything about her. But my hairdresser did. All the ladies in my hairdressing place said, ‘Oh, she’s Jewish and she’s from Long Island and she has a lot of money and she’s looking for a tight old man.’

“I thought that might be worth investigating.”

MacLaine soon found herself going toe-to-toe, as it were, with Dame Maggie Smith. In character, of course.

“Oh, God,” MacLaine said. “Should I tell this story?”

Yes, of course, Fellowes replied.

“Well, we were lovers in another life,” MacLaine said, deadpan. “You can use that, Julian. You can use it. No, she told me that we had met 40 years ago backstage at the Oscars, next to the catering table. I was up for something and there was this big chocolate cake on the catering table. Whatever I was up for, I lost, and somebody else won. And Maggie said, ‘You know what you did, dear? You tucked right into that chocolate cake and said, ‘F— it. I don’t care if I’m thin ever again.” She remembered more than me. But then she’s younger than me. She’s one year younger.”

Dockery, for her part, still hasn’t tired of the Downton Abbey parodies. Andy Samberg’s digital short for Saturday Night Live, featuring “The Chicken Lady” and her daughters, “Hot,” “Way Hot,” and “The Other One,” is a favourite.

“There have been so many parodies, I think we should do one ourselves,” Dockery said, and they all laughed.

National TV columnist for Postmedia News Network.
Two solitudes:
“My dream is to have a bank of TVs where all the different channels are on at the same time and I can be monitoring them,” the social... read more critic Camille Paglia told Wired magazine, back in the day, before Big Brother and before Survivor. “I love the tabloid stuff. The trashier the program is, the more I feel it’s TV.”
And then there’s this, from Gilligan’s Island creator Sherwood Schwartz: “There’s a lot of underlying philosophy to the characters on Gilligan’s Island. They’re really a metaphor for the nations of the world, and their purpose was to show how nations have to get along together . . . or cease to exist.”
There you have it, then. The trashier a program is, the more it’s like TV. Or, if you prefer, TV is a metaphor for the nations of the world, and Gilligan’s Island was really a message about why we don’t all get along.
That’s where I come in.
My first TV memory was of being menaced by a Dalek on Doctor Who — the original, scratchy, black-and-white Who.
My more recent TV memories include the Sopranos finale; 9/11; Elvis Costello’s first appearance (and temporary banishment) on Saturday Night Live; what was really inside the Erlenmeyer flask in The X-Files; Law & Order (the original, and those iconic chimes); glued to the set at 3am local time during the 2003 war in Iraq — TV’s first real-time war —and Bart Simpson scrawling on the chalkboard in The Simpsons’ opening credits: “I Must Not Write All Over the Walls.”
Other Bart-isms, as seen on that TV chalkboard over the years: “I Will Never Win an Emmy,” “I No Longer Want My MTV,” and, pointedly — if a little hopefully — “Network TV is Not Dead.”
I was there to witness "the new dawn of the sitcom" in the mid-1990s, followed — inevitably — by the glut of terrible sitcoms in the early naughts, a glut that led, directly and indirectly, to the rise of reality TV.
There’s been a lot to talk about — good, bad and indifferent — about TV over the years.
That’s where you, and this space, come in. Read on. Enjoy, feel free to agree, disagree and dispute whenever you want. TV may be ugly at times, but it's a mirror of democracy in action. A funhouse mirror at times, a sober reflection at others.View author's profile